Most vulnerable of all were the women of the streets. Prostitutes, or, as the press and polite society preferred to call them, ‘unfortunates’ and ‘fallen women’, were not only at the mercy of their customers. They were also often viewed as being barely human. One of Europe’s leading criminal anthropologists claimed in 1889 that: ‘Professional prostitutes are incomplete beings … they bear signs of physical and psychological degeneration that demonstrate their imperfect evolution.’ The descriptions of the victims of Jack the Ripper only reinforced this stereotype. They were relatively old (mostly in their forties), in poor health, and lived in the worst type of housing in the worst area of London. Most had tragic back stories of lost innocence, violent spouses, poverty and a hopeless day-to-day existence relieved only by alcohol. Death might have been a merciful release had it not been for the cruel manner in which it was brought about.106
Social commentators had been fretting about ‘The Great Social Evil’ long before 1888. In 1869, the journalist James Greenwood listed it as one of the ‘Seven Curses of London’, adding that:
The monstrous evil in question has grown to its present dimensions chiefly because we have silently borne with it and let it grow up in all its lusty rankness under our noses; and rather than pluck it up by the roots, rather than acknowledge its existence even, have turned away our heads and inclined our eyes skywards and thanked God for the many mercies conferred on us.
Two years later William Logan, a former city missionary, called for the ‘suppression of this widespread vice and the reclamation of its miserable victims’. He told of girls as young as eight giving themselves up to prostitution and stated that six years was the average lifetime of their career. Logan called for these women to be banned from walking the streets, having already remarked that, ‘eight out of every ten are going about in a diseased condition … reflect for a moment upon its fearful consequences on virtuous unsuspecting wives and innocent children’. The Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864 already allowed police to arrest prostitutes to check for venereal disease in an attempt to halt its spread through the armed forces, and there were calls for these checks to be extended outside the ports and garrison towns. There was also a vigorous campaign for them to be repealed, led by the feminist Josephine Butler, who saw the Acts as the unfair criminalisation of women rather than the men who paid for their services. The Acts were eventually repealed in 1886.107
That battle mirrored the debate over what should be done about these ‘fallen women’. Should they be removed from the streets and locked away out of sight, as the antithesis of the Victorian domestic ideal? Or should they be given help, food and lodging and encouraged to abandon their lives of sin? Estimates of the number of prostitutes in London varied from the low thousands to 80,000. In 1888 the police gave a figure of 5,678 (with an estimated 1,200 in Whitechapel) and reported that over the year a total of 2,797 had been arrested; 1,475 were convicted of ‘annoying male passengers for the purpose of prostitution’, while fifty-two were acquitted of the same charge. Of course, not all prostitutes were in their forties and living in squalor in the East End. At least six ‘types’ were listed in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. There were ‘kept mistresses and prima donnas’ living in private houses, funded by their lovers; the ‘board lodgers’ paying brothel madams for their accommodation; those that lived in the disreputable ‘low lodging houses’ for 4d a night; those who serviced sailors and soldiers; the partners of thieves; and prostitutes who looked for business in the parks after dark. Mayhew also included ‘cohabitant prostitutes’, whose partners could not afford to marry and ‘clandestine prostitutes’, such as maidservants. There was even:
The happy prostitute … either the thoroughly hardened clever infidel who knows how to command men and use them for her own purposes … and who in the end seldom fails to marry well; or the quiet woman who is kept by the man she loves and who she feels is fond of her; who has had a provision made for her to guard her against want and the caprice of her paramour.108
The ‘higher class’ prostitutes had traditionally gone about their business untroubled by the police at brothel-clubs like the Argyll Rooms in the West End before it was closed in 1878. ‘The place was looked upon by many as an actual necessity,’ wrote former Chief Inspector Cavanagh.
It was far better for a particular class to be hidden away from the public gaze than that they should flaunt themselves in public thoroughfares … but as time went on public opinion altered, and slowly but surely a change began to creep over even those who were loudest in their protestations that the place was a necessary evil.
There was a determined move against brothels towards the end of the century, involving not just the forces of law and order, but also social campaigners like Frederick Charrington. He gave up his fortune as heir to a family of brewers to root out houses of vice throughout the East End. On 2 February 1888, he reported three brothels in Thames Street, Devonshire Street and Commercial Road, in Whitechapel, under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. This piece of legislation had been passed partly as a result of a campaign by the Pall Mall Gazette, which had published an exposé of the alleged sale of London virgins to the sex trade. The ‘story of an actual pilgrimage into a real hell’ surpassed the antics even of the recently demised News of the World. The editor, W.T. Stead, set about finding a thirteen-year-old girl; he took her from her mother to a house off Oxford Street, doped her with chloroform, had her undress and then posed as a client. She was then handed over to the Salvation Army. Except the mother claimed she hadn’t sold her daughter into sex slavery – she believed the girl was going to be a domestic servant. The set-up earned Stead a three-month prison sentence, but the Act was passed. One of its provisions raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.109
The effect of this clampdown on brothels was to force prostitutes out on to the streets to ply their trade in alleyways, courts and darkened doorways. They were therefore exposed not only to violent sexual predators, but also to the police officers whose duty it was to arrest them for causing a public nuisance. In the early to mid-1880s, between 5,000 and 7,000 prostitutes were arrested every year, and the numbers charged with ‘annoying male passengers for the purposes of prostitution’ rose to 3,233 in 1886. However, by 1888 only 2,797 prostitutes were arrested and 1,475 were charged, a reduction of over half. Why? The main reason was that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Charles Warren, had ordered that streetwalkers should not be arrested unless a third party came forward with a complaint. Police officers could no longer take action solely on the evidence of what they themselves had witnessed. This change in tactics came about as a result of a public scandal in 1887 after a police officer detained twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Cass for soliciting in Regent’s Street. Miss Cass turned out to be a respectable dress designer who had been taking a walk after leaving work in Southampton Row. The officer responsible, Bowen Endacott, who had been specifically tasked to bring in prostitutes, was put on trial for perjury at the Old Bailey. He was acquitted but the order remained in place and Warren was later criticised for encouraging prostitutes to once again throng the streets. At the height of the Whitechapel murders, Sir Robert Anderson, head of the CID, told the Home Secretary that he wanted to arrest every known ‘street woman found on the prowl after midnight’. This was thought to be too drastic and instead he decided to ‘warn them that the Police will not protect them’.110
After walking the streets, prostitutes would return to cheap rented rooms or, if they could not afford that, ‘common lodging houses’ which charged 4d a night in return for a filthy vermin-ridden bed. If they did not go out to work they would starve or end up in the dreaded workhouse. These common lodging houses had already received plenty of attention before 1888. They could be hugely profitable enterprises even though they catered for the poorest in society. Perversely, they thrived even as attempts continued to clear slums and rookeries to make space for wider thoroughfares and model dwellings for the working class. One result of slum clearance was that people were pushed into surrounding areas. Overcrowding also increased as residents grouped together to pay the high rent bills. But the itinerant or casual worker who could not depend on a regular wage all year round was left with the lodging houses, which crammed as many beds as possible into their rooms to maximise revenue. Legislation was introduced to regulate them in 1851. It required them to be registered with the police and open to inspection but, in reality, there was little oversight and they became a byword for crime and depravity. That reputation did not dent their popularity and owners were able to use their profits to buy up even more properties to turn into common lodging houses. The celebrated ‘Worst Street in London’, Dorset Street in Whitechapel, was infested with them by the 1870s, but they were not just to be found in the East End. At the end of 1888, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner reported that there were 995 registered common lodging houses able to accommodate 32,172 lodgers, an increase of thirty-six houses on the previous year. Another 228 unregistered houses had been discovered and served with notices to register. Only twelve keepers of registered houses were convicted of infringements of the regulations. It was also noted that sixty-three residents had died of illness, mostly related to lack of warmth and food, or overindulgence in alcohol. There were twenty-four cases of infectious disease, including scarlet fever, typhoid and ‘itch’.111
Howard Goldsmid visited common lodging houses across the East End as well as those in Borough and Covent Garden for his 1886 book Dottings of a Dosser. His investigation was intended to reveal living conditions worse than those found in the slums which had been the subject of previous journalistic exposés:
There is … a stratum of society even lower than that of the poor wretches who herd together in noisome courts and foetid filthy alleys. These are the unfortunate creatures whose only home is the doss’ouse, whose only friend the deppity; who have, perhaps, for years never known what it is to have the shelter of a room, save that of a common lodging house. There is no bitter cry from these, or at all events they have as yet found no spokesman to echo it in the public ear.
In the common lodging house he found boys of all ages, loafers, navvies, costermongers, thieves, unemployed artisans, ruined shopkeepers and even professional men whose careers as doctors and solicitors had ended in disaster. There were also prostitutes. Goldsmid claimed that lodging houses doubled as ‘houses of ill-fame’ despite the presence of corruptible children. He described a group of streetwalkers at one establishment called the ‘Little Wonder’ in Flower and Dean Street, another notorious slum in Spitalfields.
All were smoking, sweating and shouting; and all, especially the women, were about as ill looking and undesirable specimens of humanity as one could meet in a lifetime. The unhappy women were by many degrees worse than the men. Their language was more obscene, their habits were more filthy, and they had abandoned even those primitive restraints of decency which hold sway over savages. Circes, they wallowed in moral filth, and seemed to revel in their degradation.
Yet for all his sensationalist prose, Goldsmid was highlighting common lodging houses and the lives of prostitutes because he believed something should be done to improve the situation. It was not enough just to appoint a committee or a royal commission, pass limited legislation and then move on to the next scandal. In a prescient warning about what might happen if the public sympathy for the most desperate in society went back to sleep, he wrote that: ‘Its slumbers will probably last until the curtain which shrouds the only partially depicted scenes of London wretchedness be lifted with a ruder hand, and the “bitter cry” sound more bitter and perhaps more menacing.’
Two years later, between April and November 1888, eight prostitutes were murdered and others suffered life-threatening injuries. All were killed in the East End, although the last was out in Poplar on the other side of the River Lea. Only five are generally accepted to be victims of the Ripper.
In the early morning of 3 April 1888, Emma Smith staggered back to her home at the common lodging house at No.18 George Street, Spitalfields. Her face and head were battered and bleeding and her ear was torn. She was also clutching ‘the lower part of the body’. Emma Smith told the deputy house keeper, Mary Russell, that she had been attacked and robbed. After being taken to the hospital, she told the doctor how she had been walking along Osborne Street in Whitechapel at 1.30 a.m. when she noticed three men walking towards her. One of them looked to be about nineteen years old. ‘She crossed the road to avoid them, but they followed, assaulted her, took all the money she had, and then committed the outrage,’ reported The Times. This outrage was the insertion of a blunt object into her vagina with enough force to rupture her peritoneum, the lining of the stomach cavity. She was unable to say what had been used, but the coroner later suggested that it was something like a walking stick. Emma Smith died of peritonitis the next morning, Wednesday 4 April. The lodging house deputy confirmed that the victim had stayed there for around eighteen months and had worked on the streets as a prostitute. She was known to act ‘like a mad woman’ when intoxicated and had often come home with black eyes. Once she claimed that she had been thrown out of a window. She was forty-five years old, 5ft 2in tall and had light brown hair. Her background remains unclear – she claimed to be a widowed mother of two who had left her husband in 1877, and that her son and daughter lived in Finsbury Park. Walter Dew claimed in his memoirs that ‘there was a touch of culture in her speech unusual in her class’.
Witnesses stated that she had left home at around 7 p.m. on the Bank Holiday Monday and was seen talking to a man at the corner of Farrant Street and Burdett Road at around 12.15 a.m. He was dressed in a dark suit with a white silk handkerchief around his neck. She made no complaint to police and at the inquest on 7 April, the chief inspector of the Whitechapel Division admitted that he had no official information and only knew of the case through newspaper reports. The jury returned a verdict of ‘wilful murder against some person or some persons unknown’ but the police made little progress with their investigation. The case was listed as the first of eleven in the ‘Whitechapel Murders’ file and, like the others, it remained unsolved.112
While Dew believed Emma Smith was the first Ripper victim, Melville MacNaghten had ‘no doubt that her death was caused by some young hooligans who escaped arrest’. One theory put forward by the press was that she was murdered by a ‘High Rip’ gang, which more than likely was a complete fabrication. Sir John William Nott-Bower, later Commissioner for the City of London police, said a gang with the same name was said to be responsible for a series of violent crimes in Liverpool. ‘All this created considerable, and entirely unjustifiable alarm, though there was never the very faintest shadow of foundation for the suggestions made … it was impossible, for such a gang could not have existed without the Police ever hearing of it.’ Either way, said Dew, ‘by most people the crime was merely regarded as a more than usually unpleasant incident in a district in which acts of violence were of daily occurrence.’113
Even before the murder of Emma Smith, at least two women had suffered serious assaults. On Saturday 25 February, Annie Millwood was admitted to the Whitechapel Workhouse infirmary with stab wounds to the legs and lower body. She claimed to have been attacked by a stranger armed with a clasp knife. On 21 March she was discharged and went to another workhouse in the Mile End Road. Ten days later she collapsed and died from a rupture of the left pulmonary artery. Her death was certified as due to natural causes, unconnected to the attack. Then in the early hours of 28 March, Ada Wilson, said to be thirty-nine years old, was knifed twice in the throat on her doorstep in No.19 Maidman Street, Mile End. She survived and told the police that she had answered a knock at the door at 12.30 a.m. to find a stranger wearing a dark coat, light trousers and a wideawake hat; he looked to be aged around thirty and was 5ft 6in tall. He demanded money and stabbed her when she refused. Although she was described as a dressmaker or seamstress, a neighbour’s account suggested she was a prostitute and had brought the male visitor back to her room. 114
It was the murder of Martha Tabram in the early hours of Tuesday 6 August which the newspapers later seized upon as the first of the series. The attack took place less than 100 yards from that on Emma Smith, on the morning after a Bank Holiday Monday, and the victim was a prostitute. Her body was found on the first-floor landing of a block of model dwellings in Whitechapel, the George Yard Buildings. She had been stabbed thirty-nine times. It was reported at the inquest that her left lung had been penetrated five times, her right lung twice, her heart once, her liver five times, spleen twice and stomach six times. One of the wounds went through her sternum and the doctor concluded it must have been made with a strong blade such as a dagger or bayonet. Martha Tabram was thirty-nine years old, 5ft 3in tall and had dark hair. She was the youngest of five children of warehouseman Charles Samuel White and his wife Elizabeth. At the age of twenty she had married Henry Samuel Tabram, the foreman of a furniture-packing warehouse, and lived in Southwark not far from where she was born. They had two sons but the marriage ended because he was unable to stand Martha’s heavy drinking. She took a warrant out against him after he refused to pay her sufficient maintenance and he was locked up. In 1879, he learned that she was living with another man, the carpenter Henry Turner. Her fondness for ale again plagued this relationship, and they separated three months before her murder. The couple had lived in a common lodging house off the Commercial Road in Whitechapel, but Martha was said to have frequently gone out at night on her own. She ended up at another lodging house at No.19 George Street, Spitalfields.
On the night of 5 August she had visited a number of public houses in Whitechapel with a friend called ‘Pearly Poll’, Mary Ann Connelly. According to Connelly, they met two soldiers – one a private and one a corporal – and at 11.45 p.m. they paired off with the men and went their separate ways. Martha’s body was first seen on the landing at 3.30 a.m. but the police were not alerted until around 4.50 a.m. when John Saunders Reeves discovered her lying in a pool of blood. Detectives focused on trying to identify the soldiers, and Connelly picked out two privates with the Coldstream Guards at Wellington Barracks. However, both men had alibis and the investigation stalled. Returning a verdict of wilful murder, the inquest jury recommended that a lamp be installed at the lodging house. The coroner George Collier called it ‘one of the most dreadful murders anyone could imagine. The man must have been a perfect savage to inflict such a number of wounds on a defenceless woman in such a way’. But there was much worse to come.115
Three weeks passed. Then in the early hours of Friday 31 August 1888, while the East End sky was lit up by the huge fire devouring warehouses and workshops at the London docks, Mary Ann Nichols was found with her throat cut in Buck’s Row, Whitechapel. Her lower clothing had been raised to her stomach to expose jagged wounds and slashes to her abdomen. Although her injuries were of a different type to those suffered by Tabram, the newspapers were soon linking the two cases because it made a better story.
Mary Ann Nichols, known as ‘Polly’, had turned forty-three five days earlier. She was 5ft 2in with greying brown hair; she had a scar on her forehead and was missing her front teeth. She was born near Fleet Street, the second of three children to blacksmith Edward Walker and his wife Caroline. At nineteen she had married a printer, William Nichols, and over the next fifteen years had five children. At first they lived off Fleet Street and then south of the river in Walworth and Southwark before breaking up in 1880. There had been a series of separations over Mary Ann’s drinking habits, and eventually William Nichols had an affair with the girl who nursed his wife during her final pregnancy. As a result, she entered the Lambeth Workhouse, describing herself as a charwoman. Over the next seven years she went in and out of workhouses in Lambeth, St Giles, Edmonton and Holborn, and spent time on and off with her father. She was also said to be working as a prostitute. In February 1887 she was sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square and was sent back to Lambeth Workhouse. Then, in May 1888, she was given a chance of employment as a domestic servant with a married couple in Wandsworth. She wrote to her father, saying:
It is a grand place inside, with trees and gardens back and front. All has been newly done up. They are teetotallers, and religious, so I ought to get on. They are very nice people, and I have not too much to do … So goodbye for the present. From yours truly, Polly.
Two months later, her father learned that she had run off with £3 10s worth of clothing.
After this setback, Mary Ann gravitated towards the East End. In the first three weeks of August she was staying in a room with four other women at Wilmott’s Lodging House at No.18 Thrawl Street, Spitalfields. This short and narrow road was packed with similar establishments, and excited journalists into florid condemnations of its ‘destitution and depravity’. Howard Goldsmid wrote:
The dwelling houses are all poor and mean; the gutters in the daytime are full of squalling children; and refuse of all sorts is lying about in every direction. When closing time comes, and the dram shops and gin-palaces have sent their contingent to reinforce the representatives of sinning and suffering humanity that crowd the unwholesome street, Thrawl Street is a thing to shudder at, not to see. Women who have reached the lowest depth of degradation to which their sex can sink, are rolling unsteadily along the footpath, or quarrelling in front of the public houses from which they have just been expelled. Men are fighting, swearing and hiccoughing out snatches of objectionable songs. Babies, who have been taken in their mothers’ arms to the drinking dens which rob them of their food and clothing, are wailing loudly; and the noise of quarrelling, intoxication and lamentation are to be heard on every side.
In the week before her death, Mary Ann was staying at a more disreputable mixed doss-house at No.56 Flower and Dean Street, but on the night of 30/31 August, after visiting a pub in Brick Lane, she returned to Wilmott’s at 1 a.m. Her hopes of staying there ended when the deputy lodging house keeper threw her out because she did not have 4d for a bed. Mary Ann is said to have pointed to her new black bonnet and replied, ‘I’ll soon get my doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.’ Her friend Emily Holland, who had gone to see the fire at Ratcliffe dry dock, saw her at 2.30 a.m. staggering drunkenly down Osborne Street. She tried to convince Mary Ann to go back to Thrawl Street but was told, ‘I have had my lodging money three times today, and I have spent it.’ It seems she ended up in Buck’s Row (now Durward Street), off Vallance Road, attempting to earn her doss money. It was a ‘secluded place’ with residential buildings on only one side. Neither of the police officers passing on their beat heard or saw anything suspicious. Emma Green, a widow living with her two sons and a daughter in the cottage next to the murder scene, heard nothing. The same applied to Walter Purkiss, his wife, children and servant, who lived in Essex Wharf across the road. Nothing of interest was noted by a night porter at the working lads’ institute in Winthrop Street, which ran parallel to Buck’s Row, or by the workers of a slaughterhouse 70 yards away. The alarm was only raised when Charles Andrew Cross saw Mary Ann’s body on his way to work at 3.45 a.m. She was wearing a ‘reddish Ulster, somewhat the worse for wear, a new brown linsey dress, two flannel petticoats with marks of Lambeth Workhouse on them, and a pair of stays, fastened’.
The Times of 3 September referred back to the two previous murders in Whitechapel and reported that the police ‘had no clue’ as to the perpetrator. It also claimed that detectives had abandoned the gang theory in favour of a lone male. Speculation was still rampant when the mutilated body of Annie Chapman was discovered in the backyard of No.29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields.116
Like Mary Ann Nichols and Martha Tabram, Annie was not brought up in the East End. She was born Annie Eliza Smith in September 1841, six months before her parents George Smith, a soldier in the Life Guards, and Ruth Chapman, married in Paddington. The family then moved to Knightsbridge and Annie appears to have stayed there when her parents moved to Clewer in Berkshire in the 1850s. In 1869, aged seventeen, she married a relative of her mother called John Chapman, who worked as a coachman for wealthy gentlemen. Three children followed. The first died of meningitis at the age of twelve and the youngest was sent away to an institution for the disabled. In 1881 they moved to Berkshire for John’s work; but by this time Annie was a heavy drinker and the relationship ended. John Chapman, who was obviously fond of alcohol himself, died of cirrhosis of the liver on Christmas Day 1886. With no 10s weekly maintenance to fall back on, Annie returned to London and began living at common lodging houses in Whitechapel and Spitalfields. It is said she tried to make a living by selling flowers and matches on the street, but she was known to bring men back with her at night. Annie also formed brief relationships with two men, one of them being a forty-seven-year-old bricklayer’s labourer nicknamed ‘The Pensioner’. She continued to battle her addiction to alcohol, particularly rum, and was at times successful. By September 1888 she was living at Crossingham’s Lodging House at No.35 Dorset Street and attempting to restrict herself to only drinking on Saturday nights.
In the week before her death she was seen with bruises to her head and chest, possibly as a result of a fight with another woman, and complained of feeling unwell. On Friday 7 September, she claimed to have got some money from her sister in Vauxhall which she used to buy some beer and a hot potato but, by 1.35 a.m., she did not have enough to pay the 8d needed for her bed that night. She promised she would be back with it soon and left in the direction of Spitalfields Market. She was forty-seven years old, with dark brown wavy hair, blue eyes and a thick, flat nose, and was wearing a long black coat, black skirt, brown bodice, two petticoats, red and white striped woollen stockings and boots. She was last seen at 5.30 a.m. with a man outside No.29 Hanbury Street, a three-storey house occupied by seventeen people, including an elderly woman selling meat for cats, two cabmen and their families, and a widow running a packing-case business with her son. None of them heard or saw anything. The man was heard asking Annie, ‘Will you?’ to which she replied, ‘Yes’. The pair would have had no difficulty completing their transaction in the backyard of No.29, as the front and back doors were left open all day, possibly because there were so many lodgers.
At the inquest, the coroner Wynne Baxter, aware of the frenzied interest in the case, and perhaps keen to play to the gallery, laid out his interpretation of what happened next:
After the two had passed through the passage and opened the swing door at the end, they descended the three steps into the yard. On their left-hand side there was a recess between those steps and the palings. Here, a few feet from the house, and a less distance from the palings, they must have stood. The wretch must have then seized the deceased, perhaps with Judas-like approaches. He seized her by the chin. He pressed her throat, and while thus preventing the slightest cry, he at the same time produced insensibility and suffocation. There was no evidence of any struggle. The clothes were not torn. Even in those preliminaries, the wretch seems to have known how to carry out efficiently his nefarious work. The deceased was then lowered to the ground and laid on her back; and although in doing so she may have fallen slightly against the fence, the movement was probably effected with care. Her throat was then cut in two places with savage determination, and the injuries to the abdomen commenced. All was done with cool impudence and reckless daring; but perhaps nothing was more noticeable than the emptying of her pockets and the arrangements of their contents with business-like precision in order near her feet … There were two things missing. Her rings had been wrenched from her fingers and had not since been found, and the uterus had been taken from the abdomen.117
The graphic nature of the injuries to Annie Chapman needed no spin or exaggeration, but the similarities between the latest murder and that of Polly Nichols gave the press the freedom to indulge in their taste for sensation. Allusions had already been made to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,118 and now the editorials overflowed with speculation about the nature of the killer. He was ‘labouring under some terrible form of insanity’, was filled with ‘hideous malice, deadly cunning, insatiable thirst for blood’, and responsible for crimes ‘so distinctly outside the ordinary range of human experience that it has created a kind of stupor extending far beyond the district where the murders were committed’. Newspapers competed to describe the panic and terror that was undoubtedly spreading through the city at that time. Molly Hughes, in her 1936 memoir A London Girl of the Eighties, wrote that:
No one can now believe how terrified and unbalanced we all were … it seemed to be round the corner, although it all happened in the East End and we were in the West; but even so, I was afraid to go out after dark, if only to post a letter. Just as dusk came on we used to hear down our quiet and ultra-respectable Edith Road the cries of newspaper-boys, in tones made as alarming as they could: Another ’orrible murder! … Whitechapel! … Murder! … Disgustin’ details. … Murder!
For her, what was alarming was the way the killer seemed to strike quickly and then disappear as if by some kind of supernatural force. Likewise, the writer Compton Mackenzie, then aged five, remembered the autumn of 1888 as ‘the most difficult time of my childhood because it was then that the nightly fears and fantasies became acute’. He wrote in his memoirs that:
It was Jack the Ripper who first made the prospect of going to bed almost unendurable … Whitechapel became a word of dread, and I can recall the horror of reading ‘Whitechapel’ at the bottom of the list of fares at the far end inside an omnibus.
There were also reports of crowds of men and boys gathering in the streets chanting: ‘Down with the Jews.’119
Sir Charles Warren viewed the hysteria with dismay. ‘A moment’s serious thought would have been sufficient to show that the only people to whom the fiend was a menace were the poor women of the streets,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘But I am afraid that the respectable women of Whitechapel derived small comfort at the time from any such reflection, and everywhere extreme precautions were taken against the Ripper’s coming.’ There may also be a hint of moral judgement that the victims were ‘only prostitutes’, who were putting their own lives at risk by maintaining an immoral lifestyle. ‘The victims, without exception, belonged to the lowest dregs of female humanity, who avoid the police and exercised every ingenuity in order to remain in the darkest corners of the most deserted alleys,’ was the verdict of the future Assistant Commissioner, Melville MacNaghten. Prostitutes were treated as outcasts by pretty much every section of society, even the poorest. At the height of the Ripper murders, the socialist John Burns noted in his diary for 1888 how customers of a coffee house were avoiding the only vacant seat because it was next to a ‘dirty, bedraggled and diseased’ prostitute. ‘Repulsive though she was I thought it necessary to remind the workmen that I was not influenced by her poverty and degraded condition and sat down beside her. This unexpected consideration visibly affected her and increased her sympathy and secured her gratitude.’ He noted that the only distinction between her and the workmen was that ‘they prostitute another part of their body – their hands’.120
Elizabeth Stride was well known to the police for prostitution and drunken behaviour. Stride was actually Swedish, born Elisabeth Gustafsdotter on 27 November 1843, on a farm in Torslanda, north of Gothenburg. At the age of seventeen she was working as a domestic maid, but three years later her life was beginning its unhappy trajectory. She left her job, her mother died, she contracted a venereal disease and she gave birth to a stillborn child. In March 1865, at the age of twenty-one, she was registered by Swedish police as a prostitute.
The following year, attempting to turn her life around, she travelled to England using her inheritance. In 1869 she married a carpenter from Regent’s Park, John Thomas Stride, and opened a coffee shop with him in Poplar. She was later to claim that her husband and two of her nine children died on the paddle steamer Princess Alice, which sank in the River Thames in 1878, although this seems to be a total fabrication as he died of heart disease in 1884. By then the couple had separated, most likely because of Elizabeth’s heavy drinking, and in January 1882 she was living in Flower and Dean Street in Spitalfields. In 1884 she was sentenced to seven days’ hard labour for soliciting for the purposes of prostitution, and throughout 1887 and 1888 she was repeatedly hauled before the magistrates for drunk and disorderly behaviour and using obscene language. During this time she was living on and off with a waterside labourer, Michael Kidney, who later said: ‘It was drink that made her go away … She always returned without me going after her. I think she liked me better than any other man.’ He claimed he last saw her on 25 September 1888. She was nearly forty-five but looked younger, was 5ft 5in in height and had curly brown hair.
The following day she was seen at No.32 Flower and Dean Street by the philanthropist and ‘do-gooder’ Thomas Barnardo. Writing of his visit to the lodging house, among others, in the November issue of his magazine Night and Day, he described talking to girls and women in the kitchen about the Whitechapel murders.
The female inmates of the kitchen seemed thoroughly frightened at the dangers to which they were presumably exposed … One poor creature, who had evidently been drinking, exclaimed somewhat bitterly to the following effect. ‘We’re all up to no good, and no one cares what becomes of us. Perhaps some of us will be killed next!’ And then she added, ‘If anybody had helped the likes of us long ago we would never have come to this!’ I have since visited the mortuary in which were lying the remains of the poor woman Stride, and I at once recognised her as one of those who stood around me in the kitchen of the common lodging house on the occasion of my visit … surely the awful revelations consequent upon the recent tragedies should stir the whole community up to action and to the resolve to deliver the children of today, who will be the men and women of tomorrow, from so evil an environment.
On the afternoon of Saturday 29 September, Elizabeth Stride was paid 6d for cleaning rooms at the lodging house. At 11 p.m. she was seen with a man leaving a pub in Settles Street, Whitechapel, and there were further sightings of her with a man in Berner Street at 11.45 p.m. and 12.35 a.m. Ten minutes later Israel Schwartz, who lived off Backchurch Lane, saw Elizabeth Stride being pushed to the ground in the gateway leading to Dutfield’s Yard and the International Workingmen’s Educational Association at No.40 Berner Street. She screamed three times. Schwartz then ran off and did not see what happened next. At the time, there were between twenty and thirty people singing in the club following a discussion about the ‘necessity for socialism among Jews’. Their merriment stopped abruptly at around 1 a.m. when they were told that a woman had been found outside with her throat cut. Elizabeth Stride had not suffered any other injuries and this was immediately taken to indicate that the killer had been interrupted before he could begin his mutilation. It might also suggest that it had nothing to do with the murders of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman. But when another prostitute was found dead forty-five minutes later, it seemed too much of a coincidence.121
Catherine Eddowes was a year older than Elizabeth Stride but, like Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman, she appears to have turned to prostitution much later in life following the breakdown of her marriage. She was born in Wolverhampton in 1842 but the following year she moved with her parents to London when her father found a job as a tinplate worker in the City of London. Her mother died at the age of forty-two in 1855, having given birth to twelve children, and her father followed two years later. Catherine left the family home in Bermondsey and returned to Wolverhampton. After working as a tinplate stamper and a tray polisher, she began a relationship with a former soldier, Thomas Conway, and had his initials tattooed on her arm. Their first child, a daughter, arrived in 1863 and they moved back to Westminster in London. Two sons followed, but the family was being torn apart by Catherine’s alcoholism and she is said to have regularly disappeared for months at a time. Conway is also said to have beaten her during their rows. In 1880 she left their home in Chelsea and ended up in the East End, possibly because her sister was living in Spitalfields. She fell in with a man named John Kelly and lived with him at Cooney’s common lodging house at No.55 Flower and Dean Street. Cooney’s was almost a brand – they had several other branches in Thrawl Street, all offering single beds for 4d and doubles for 8d. One of the Thrawl Street outlets was described by Howard Goldsmid as being ‘stuffy, close, ill-ventilated, and stenchful beyond expression’. He also complained that it was populated by half a dozen cats chasing rats, a malnourished eight-year-old girl carrying out domestic chores on the orders of her drunken mother, and a man enthusiastically pontificating on religion, the economy, the law, medical science and the higher education of women.
Although they were living in a notorious slum, witnesses claimed Catherine was not habitually walking the streets and it is likely that she only resorted to it when money was tight. She is also said to have worked as a domestic servant for Jewish families in the area, while John Kelly tried to earn a wage on the markets, and every year they joined the crowds heading out to the country for the hop-picking season. In 1888 they went to Hunton near Maidstone in Kent but ‘didn’t get on any too well’ and they returned to London almost penniless on Friday 28 September. Kelly had to pawn his boots for 2s but this didn’t last long and the following day, at 2 p.m., Catherine went out alone. Kelly claimed that she was going to try to get money from her sister in Bermondsey, but by 8.30 p.m. she was slumped drunkenly on the pavement of Aldgate High Street. Her condition attracted the attention of a police officer and she was taken off to Bishopsgate station, where she gave her name as ‘Nothing’. It was one of the safest places for a prostitute to be at night, but tragically for Catherine Eddowes she was found fit to be released at just before 1 a.m. She gave her name as Mary Ann Kelly and her address as No.6 Fashion Street, adding, ‘I shall get a fine hiding when I get home.’ Her last words to the constable as he ushered her out were, ‘Good night old cock.’
Instead of heading towards Flower and Dean Street and home, she went the opposite way towards Houndsgate and Aldgate High Street. She was 5ft tall with dark hair and wearing a black straw bonnet, a black cloth jacket with imitation fur collar, a piece of apron round her neck, a dark green skirt printed with Michaelmas daisies and golden lilies, brown stockings and a pair of men’s laced boots. At 1.35 a.m. she, or another woman with a black bonnet, was seen standing with a man at the entrance to the passage between Duke Street and Mitre Square. There were at least two patrolling uniformed officers and three plain-clothes officers in the area at the time, but none saw anything suspicious. ‘Never in the history of the East End of London had such elaborate precautions been taken to prevent the very thing which had not only been done, but repeated,’ claimed Walter Dew. ‘Hundreds of police, in uniform, in plainclothes and in all manner of disguises – some even dressed as women – patrolled every yard of every street in the “danger zone’’ every few minutes.’ But it was not enough. At 1.45 a.m. PC Edward Watkins entered Mitre Square and found Catherine Eddowes’ mutilated body slumped in a darkened corner, ‘ripped up like a pig in a market’.
The killer had used what few minutes he had to inflict even more gruesome injuries than those suffered by Annie Chapman. Not only was the uterus missing, but also the left kidney too. A piece of intestine had been cut out and left between the body and left arm. There were knife wounds to the lower eyelids, cheeks and right ear, and the tip of her nose had been cut off. Further mysterious clues added to the Ripper legend – a piece of Catherine Eddowes’ apron was found in the entrance to a building on Goulston Street. Above it were three lines of writing in white chalk: ‘The Juwes are not the men who will be blamed for nothing.’122
It was at this point that the legend of Jack the Ripper was born. A letter, supposedly received by the Central News Agency on 27 September, was printed in the 1 October editions of the newspapers. Not only did it give the killer a memorable name, it also contained a reference to clipping ears off that was similar enough to actual events for people to believe it was genuine. A postcard postmarked 1 October, signed the same way, appeared to predict the ‘double event’. Then on 16 October, the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, a group set up by local businesses to patrol the streets, received a box containing part of a human kidney that was believed to have been taken from Catherine Eddowes.123
Here was a killer who delighted in taunting the authorities and who was equipped with surgical skill, speed, stealth and an inhuman lust for the blood of middle-aged women walking the streets after midnight.
Mary Jane Kelly was different. She was much younger, at around twenty-five years of age, and stood 5ft 7in tall. She was also said to have possessed ‘rather attractive features’. What is known of her early life comes from the account she told to her partner and friends, and may or may not be reliable. Even her true hair colour is in doubt, as indicated by her various nicknames: ‘Ginger’, ‘Fair Emma’, and ‘Black Mary’. Kelly claimed to have been born in Ireland and moved to Wales as a child. She married a collier at the age of sixteen, but he was killed in a mine explosion. After that she turned to prostitution in Cardiff before travelling to London to work in a high-class West End brothel. She claimed to have gone to Paris with a gentleman, only to return after two weeks because she did not like it. One way or another she ended up in the East End, in the parish of St George’s in the East, in and around Ratcliffe Highway (then known as St George’s Street). By 1886 she was living at a common lodging house in Thrawl Street, Spitalfields, and the following year she began a relationship with Joseph Barnett, a porter at Billingsgate Market. The couple settled in a small room costing 4s 6d a week at No.13 Miller’s Court, accessed via a passage from Dorset Street. There was a fireplace, two windows looking out on to the court (one of which was broken), a bed with a tin bath underneath, a bedside table, and a chair. The set-up worked for a while, but then Joseph lost his job in the summer of 1888 and Mary Kelly returned to prostitution to pay the rent. It was perhaps during this period that Walter Dew saw her ‘often … parading along Commercial Street, between Flower and Dean Street and Aldgate or along Whitechapel Road. She was usually in the company of two or three of her kind, fairly neatly dressed and invariably wearing a clean white apron but no hat’. Her decision to go back on the streets and to invite other prostitutes back to her room appears to have been the reason behind Joseph Barnett’s decision to go and live elsewhere on 30 October. He last saw her on the evening of Thursday 8 November, a few hours before her murder.
According to her friend Lizzie Albrook, Mary Kelly was in a melancholy mood that night:
About the last thing she said was, ‘Whatever you do don’t you do wrong and turn out as I have.’ She had often spoken to me in this way and warned me against going on the streets as she had done … I don’t believe she would have gone out as she did if she had not been obliged to do so to keep herself from starvation.
She did go out that night, and was seen taking a man back to her room at around 11.45 p.m. Two neighbours claimed to have heard her drunkenly singing the song ‘A Violet I Plucked from Mother’s Grave’:
Scenes of my childhood arise before my gaze,
Bringing recollections of bygone happy days.
When down in the meadow in childhood I would roam,
No one’s left to cheer me now within that good old home,
Father and Mother, they have pass’d away;
Sister and brother, now lay beneath the clay,
But while life does remain to cheer me, I’ll retain
This small violet I pluck’d from mother’s grave.
At 2 a.m. she was back outside asking an acquaintance, George Hutchinson, for sixpence. He did not have any money and watched her walk off down Flower and Dean Street towards Thrawl Street. According to Hutchinson, she was approached by a well-dressed Jewish-looking man who put his arm round her shoulders and walked with her back to Miller’s Court. Two other witnesses heard a cry of ‘Murder!’ between 3.30 a.m. and 4 a.m. that night, but the alarm was not raised until Thomas Bowyer went to collect the rent at around 10.45 a.m. The scene inside No.13 Miller’s Court traumatised those who saw it in 1888, and it is still shocking people today, thanks to the photographs taken by the police. Mary Kelly was lying in bed,with her throat cut, and her nose, lips, cheeks, and eyebrows sliced. Joseph Barnett could only recognise her by her ears and eyes. She had also been disembowelled and the internal organs were placed around her body. Her heart was cut out, but it is unclear whether it was taken away by the killer or not.
The authorities appear to have made a deliberate attempt to clamp down on the Ripper frenzy following this murder. Three days after the discovery of the body, the inquest was concluded quickly without fully describing the injuries or revealing new details for the next day’s papers. Whereas previously reporters had been able to see the body in the mortuary or examine the scene, on this occasion they were left to try and pick up information by speaking to local residents. At the same time, the focus of much press criticism, Sir Charles Warren, was allowed to resign. The reporting of the Kelly murder did not scale the heights of the ‘double event’ and in terms of column inches returned to the level seen in relation to Annie Chapman.
By now the killings had attracted the keen interest of Queen Victoria. After spending the previous four months fuming about the behaviour of her grandson, the German Emperor Wilhelm II, she sent a cipher telegram to the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury on 10 November:
This new most ghastly murder shows the absolute necessity for some very decided action. All these courts must be lit and our detectives improved. They are not what they should be. You promised, when the first murder took place, to consult with your colleagues about it.
Salisbury replied that the cabinet had agreed to issue a proclamation offering ‘a free pardon to anyone who should give evidence as to the recent murder except the actual perpetrator of the crime’. Three days later, after being told that Warren’s resignation had been accepted, the Queen drafted a letter to Matthews stating that: ‘the Queen fears this resignation will have a bad effect in encouraging the lawbreakers to defy the police!’ Victoria even offered her own views on how the investigation might be improved:
At the same time the Queen fears that the detective department is not so efficient as it might be. No doubt the recent murders in Whitechapel were committed in circumstances which make detection very difficult; still, the Queen thinks that, in the small area where these horrible crimes have been perpetrated, a great number of detectives might be employed and that every possible suggestion might be carefully examined and if practicable, followed.
She suggested that the police examine the cattle and passenger boats, look into the number of single men living alone and ensure that there was sufficient surveillance at night. ‘These are some of the questions that occur to the Queen on reading the accounts of this horrible crime.’ There were even discussions with Lord Salisbury about replacing Matthews with Charles Ritchie, the Tower Hamlets MP who had recently and successfully brought the 1888 Local Government Act through Parliament.124
The murders also spurred on churchmen and charity workers like Dr Barnardo, the Revd Samuel Barnett and William Booth of the Salvation Army to put forward their own suggestions as to how to solve the problems of the East End. Barnardo, who often complained about the state of his organisation’s finances, wrote to The Times after the double event, noting that ‘stimulated by the recently revealed Whitechapel horrors, many voices are daily heard suggesting as many different schemes to remedy degraded social conditions’. He then put forward his own plan to take over a common lodging house in Flower and Dean Street and to turn it into a home for:
Those unfortunate children … who from the very earliest age have been condemned to the vilest associations, who must as a matter of fact and of necessity be degraded by constant contact with fallen women, with thieves, with criminals of every type, and with persons who are veritably the pariahs of society. It is from amongst just such scenes … that I am daily snatching as from the very fire children who without such aid must become in a short time by the sure process of natural and moral laws assimilated to the degradation of their surroundings.
To do this he required generous donations from readers.
Booth, who claimed to rescue 1,000 prostitutes a year, also exploited the Ripper murders to raise money to carry out his mission. In one issue of the Salvation Army newspaper, War Cry, he printed an appeal from one of his staff, James J. Cooke:
Of course we are taking advantage of this terror, and are doing our utmost to bring the people to repentance. A few are getting saved. It was so sad to hear of the last murdered woman – Kelly – that she was quite recently on a Sunday morning in a lodging house where Capt Walker and her lieutenant were holding a meeting and sang from the same hymn book as the captain. Alas! She did not get saved. Who will help us to get the thousands of worse than heathens still living in Whitechapel and other slums saved? Send us your money or come yourself.
In December 1888, Booth presented a memorial to the government asking for £15,000 to open ten rescue homes and ten shelter depots. The request was rejected by the Home Secretary and clearly upset some members of the Church who felt that Booth’s ‘well-meaning but uninstructed philanthropy’ hindered the work already being carried out. The rector of Christ Church in Lisson Grove complained that ‘food and shelter thus supplied would in all probability have the effect of increasing destitution rather than diminishing it’. Booth was not deterred, and in 1891 he came up with an even more ambitious plan to raise £1 million and set up a series of ‘colonies’, including a ‘Whitechapel-by-the-sea’, to do for the poor what Brighton did for the middle classes.125
Smaller organisations also saw their chance to appeal for donations from concerned members of the middle and upper classes. The chairman of the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants wrote to The Times on 17 October:
Particular attention is now being drawn to a class of unfortunates, the flotsam and jetsam of that huge ocean of misery collected in this metropolis. While much may be done, and is done, by rescue work, clearly the preventive agencies are those into which our strength should be thrown … We have, I think, proved statistically that our work of befriending young servants of the helpless class does influence the girls for good … We are at the present moment grievously in want of money (our balance at the bank is nearly £200 to the bad, and our monthly cheques to the branches are withheld till more funds are available) …
Others were less disposed to helping. One reader, who sent a letter to The Times after the double murder on 30 September, opposed attempts to disperse the ‘vicious inhabitants’ of Dorset Street and Flower and Dean Street. ‘There are no lower streets in London, and, if they are driven out of these, to what streets are they to go?’ The writer suggested that the ‘unknown surgical genius … has made his contribution towards solving the problem of clearing the East End’. This kind of viewpoint had already been parodied by George Bernard Shaw in an anonymous letter sent to the Star on 24 September. He noted that public interest in the poor and helpless of the East End had only been brought about because ‘some independent genius has taken the matter in hand, and by simply murdering and disembowelling four women, converted the proprietary press to an inept sort of communism. The moral is a pretty one’. Even the victims’ pasts were used for political point scoring – on 6 October the Graphic Illustrated Newspaper rejected what it called the ‘socialist theories’ that the victims were oppressed by ‘capitalist tyranny’, and asserted that ‘they were all originally well brought up, fairly well-to-do persons, the wives of respectable men; and their terrible downward course into vice and wretchedness seems chiefly chargeable to their own misdoing’.126
The debate about ‘what is to be done’ was still raging when an eighth prostitute was found dead in east London. Police sergeant Robert Golding was patrolling along Poplar High Street with a colleague in the early hours of 20 December when he noticed a woman lying on her left side in Clarke’s Yard between Nos 184 and 186. Unlike the previous cases, there was no obvious sign of any injury to the body. It was only when the woman was taken back to the mortuary that Dr Matthew Brownfield found evidence that she may have been murdered. ‘There were slight marks of blood having escaped from the nostrils, and the right side of the nose showed a slight abrasion, while on the left cheek was an old scar,’ The Times reported. The report continued:
On the neck there was the mark apparently of a cord extending from the right side of the spine round the throat to the lobe of the left ear. He had, by experiment, found that a piece of four-fold cord would cause such a mark. On the neck he also found marks as of the thumbs and middle and index fingers … The marks ran perpendicularly to the line round the neck before described. There were no injuries to the arms or legs as if any violent struggle had taken place.
The doctor believed that the killer would have wound the cord round his hands and then pulled it tight round her neck from behind.
Although this was a completely different method to that used on previous victims, the newspapers were only too willing to pose the question that must have been on many lips: ‘HAS THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERER ADOPTED A NEW METHOD?’ The Star newspaper suggested that ‘preliminary strangulation’ may have been used to stop the victims crying out, and that any marks on the neck would have been obliterated by the cutting of the throat. There were also concerns raised by a juror at the inquest that ‘the inhabitants of Poplar are left far more unprotected than the people of Whitechapel and it is a great wonder that more murders of this kind have not been done in the neighbourhood’. On the other hand, it was reported that the neighbourhood and the police seemed uninterested in the case, and that life in Whitechapel continued as normal. ‘There has been nothing like the panic which followed the previous murders,’ read one account in the Birmingham Daily Post on 27 December. It continued:
The district from which the Whitechapel fiend has drawn his victims was yesterday the scene of terrible debauchery, which unfortunately characterises that portion of London during this season of the year. The gin palaces were thronged with women reclining under the influence of drink and the police officers who have been stationed many years at the east end of the Metropolis declare that the terrible series of crimes which have been perpetrated during the present year has had no effect in deterring or softening the women of the unfortunate class who infest certain thoroughfares in Whitechapel. On the contrary they appear to pursue their calling with greater callousness and brutality than ever.
It took several days for the victim to be identified. The head nurse at Bromley-by-Bow sick asylum recognised her as a patient by the name of Rose Mylett, who was admitted for treatment on 20 January and then discharged on 14 March 1888. In Poplar she was known as ‘Fair Alice’ Downey, but she was also known to frequent the areas of Whitechapel, Spitalfields and Bow, and had the nickname ‘Drunken Lizzie’ Davis. She was described as being 5ft 2in tall, ‘very poorly dressed, but … fairly good looking’. According to Walter Dew, she had been ‘driven out of Whitechapel by her dread of Jack the Ripper’ and police discovered that she had been staying at a common lodging house at No.18 George Street, Spitalfields – the same address as Emma Smith, and next door to an address used by Martha Tabram. The deputy described Mylett as ‘a very respectable person’. Eventually officers also tracked down Mylett’s mother, Margaret, at Pelham Street off Baker’s Row in Spitalfields. Mrs Mylett, described as an Irish-born widow, said her daughter’s real name was Catherine. Recent research suggests that she was born in Whitechapel in 1859 and had two brothers and an older sister. According to her mother, Rose went on to marry an upholsterer by the name of Davis and in September 1880 the couple had a daughter, Florence. A year later, mother and child were living together in Mile End, Old Town. Rose also appears to have had a son named Henry in 1883, before separating from her husband. By 1888 her daughter was at a school in Sutton, Surrey, and twenty-nine-year-old Rose was earning a living through prostitution. One of her friends in that line of work was Alice Graves, a fellow resident of No.18 George Street, and likely to be the same Alice Graves who had come to the attention of police a year earlier when she was charged with the murder of her fourteen-month old son. Graves was said to have admitted throwing the boy into the Thames from London Bridge on Christmas morning 1887, but police were unable to find any evidence that she ever had a child and the case was thrown out.
Rose appears to have left her lodgings at George Street between 6 and 7 p.m. on Wednesday 19 December, after borrowing 2d from her landlady Mary Smith for the tram fare to Poplar. She was dressed in brown and black, with a tweed jacket, red petticoat and red and blue striped stockings. It didn’t take her long to get there, because by 7.55 p.m. she was talking to two sailors not far from the scene of her death on Poplar High Street. According to Charles Ptomoley, a ‘lunatic attendant’ at the Poplar Poor Law Union, she was telling one of them, ‘No, no, no!’ At around midnight she was spotted in the same street by Jane Hill, who ran a boarding house at No.152, and who gave her 2d when she complained she had no money. Then at around 2.30 a.m., according to Alice Graves, she was with two men outside the George in Commercial Road, Stepney. Rose appeared drunk. If this is true, less than two hours later she was back in Poplar High Street. Clarke’s Yard, so named because it belonged to a builder named Clarke, was described in the Daily News as:
A long narrow lane leading from the main thoroughfare down to some workshops and stables. It is about eight to ten feet wide, it is not lit up; one of the two gates which formerly kept out intruders at night time has disappeared and lately the yard has become a nuisance from a sanitary point of view, while it is much frequented by women of the unfortunate class.
Nobody witnessed the attack, which must have taken place not long before the discovery of the still-warm body at 4.15 a.m. Rose was still carrying 1s 2d, so robbery seemed an unlikely motive. There was also the account of a woman named Neos Green, who claimed that shortly before the body was discovered two sailors had rushed up to her in the High Street and asked for directions to West India Docks. As they left she heard one say: ‘Make haste, Bill, and we shall be in time to catch the ship.’
Like all the previous ‘unfortunate’ victims, the murder of Rose Mylett would remain unsolved. But it is also easier to see why the police were unable to catch the person responsible. It was not because he was the legendary Jack the Ripper, but because they were not convinced it was a murder at all. Sir Robert Anderson, the Assistant Commissioner of Police, was convinced that she had died of ‘natural causes’ and ‘but for the “Jack the Ripper” scare, no one would have thought of suggesting that it was a homicide’. Three more doctors examined the body, all of them agreeing with the first report of strangulation. Anderson asked a fifth doctor for his opinion. This was Dr Thomas Bond, who had told Anderson the previous month that Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes and Kelly were killed by the same person.
At first, Bond agreed that Mylett had been strangled. However, after consulting with Anderson and making a further examination, he reported that while the fingermarks on the neck remained, the mark of the cord had disappeared. Bond suggested that the mark on her neck might have been caused by her collar when she slumped to the floor drunk and unconscious. He told the inquest that in his opinion was that it was ‘ … not murder – that the amount of violence required to strangle an able-bodied woman would leave a mark which would not disappear in five days’. Dr Bond also stated that he found a teaspoon of alcohol in a tablespoon of her stomach contents, whereas the doctor who carried out the first examination found none. In common with the previous murders there were plenty of loose ends. As the coroner summed up: ‘The usual signs of strangulation, such as protrusion of the tongue and clenching of the hands, were absent, there being nothing at all suggestive of death from violence.’ Therefore, if she had been strangled then it had probably happened quickly and while she was in a weakened condition. In the end, the inquest jury rejected Bond’s opinion and returned a verdict of wilful murder.127
The police failed to solve any of the eight murders of prostitutes in 1888. This partly reflects the status of ‘unfortunates’. They were outcasts, shunned by respectable society and forced outdoors to walk the most dangerous streets of the city at night. They were untrustworthy and could easily be discredited in court. Even in the twenty-first century, sex workers are still one of, if not the most, vulnerable and overlooked sections of society. In 2006, Steven Wright murdered five women who worked as prostitutes in the Ipswich area over six weeks, and more recently Stephen Griffiths was convicted of killing three prostitutes in Bradford. It is almost as if the authorities only take notice when the bodies start piling up. The reality is that prostitutes have fewer community ties and are less likely to be reported missing. They can be chosen at will and tempted into deserted yards and alleyways away from prying eyes. Their friends on the street are less willing to help police, and evidence of their final movements is harder to obtain. Their lifestyle also means that they are a natural target for the killer driven by hatred of women and women’s sexuality. And because it is easier to ‘get away with it’, their killers are able to strike again and again.